ARE YAHWEH AND ALLAH SAME, HOW DO THEY COMPARE?

The Bible and The Quran both describe a unitary god. They belonged to the same region, they mention some common prophets, they both say that they created the world in six days. Are they therefore same? Can the similarities or the differences between them answer above question?

> So because the Roman's took the Greek gods and changed some things that means they are not the same god?

Unimpeachable authority Rick Riordan agrees with Orion. You'll have to read The Books to achieve true understanding. I love them :)

How are we arguing this? Theologically, on a literary basis, historically, behaviorally, or what?

If there is just One, then everybody's One has to be the same One. It's just that people have imperfect understanding of the One, so they argue. As atheists, we are not allowed to believe in One (except maybe Science (or Rationality (or [wo]Man))), so we are stuck with Many.

The Romans adopted Many gods from the Greeks. That was another complex relationship. The Romans conquered the Greeks, but also looked up to them. The Romans adopted Greek religion, but their culture was very different, so the Roman versions of the Greek gods evolved different characteristics. Most were fairly slight changes of emphasis. If both places have a human-shaped sky god with a thunderbolt, and you can trace cultural influences from one place to the other, you can pretty safely say that both places worship "the same god." Wait...

You can also argue that the God the Father of Christianity is "really" Zeus/Jupiter, based on the Hellinization of religious imagery in the middle east during the rule of Alexander and, later, the Romans. I think I've read that Judaism and Islam both rejected that imagery, but it came in handy for Roman politicians as Christianity evolved into the Roman state religion.

That sort of covers literary and historical. Behavioral takes you to the other extreme. If you just look at what people do, and throw away everything you think you know about the background, you have to conclude that every group has its own little god. Why else would Catholics fight Protestants, or Sunnis fight Shiites?

Orion, What about our friends in La Iglesia Pentecostal, who pray to something called "Dios," who wants them to crawl on their knees for a mile to get to church? Mismo o diferente?

It is widely accepted that the Abrahamic religions all worship the same God. Obvious that people have their own ideas of what that means.

One problem is that the nature of that God has changed drastically over time, even within Christian tradition. The God of Genesis was a divine person, who talked to human people and fought monsters. The God of Moses was a Sinai volcano god with a bit of the trickster in him. And the Jews who came back from Babylonian Captivity brought an invisible, impersonal and universal God who conveniently supported their foreign ways.

I'll look it up, thanks. My paragraph was a mashup of stuff I remembered from a college Mythology class and a library book the title of which I can't recall. It was about literary dissection of the OT and showed clear and separate narrative voices in the text.

The Hebrew god of 100 BCE would never have sent Jesus. The god of Moses, who took His time leading the Egyptian refugees back to Palestine, would never have just accepted the refugees returning from Babylon. It's like the elephant and the blind men, peoples' ideas shift around.

Somebody on the first page of this talk said, yes they are all the same, because they are all imaginary. I'll go there.

But if you posit the existence of these gods, then you have two choices:

1. Theological: they are the same, but people approach them differently in different times and places.

2. Behavioral: because people approach them differently in different times and places, they must be different.

The first seems absurd on-face because the followers of the different religions obviously regard themselves as distinct groups. But the second becomes absurd when you consider my examples above, that the conflicts of Catholics v Protestant, English v Spanish, Baptist v Anabaptist, Sunni v Shiite, and so on, all imply that each group worships a different god. That is obviously false, as Orion proved above.

The major monotheistic religions all claim to be the true and pure form of one idea, which was invented in Iraq after the last Ice Age - that there is One Single All Powerful Creator God, and the smart money is on that guy's followers. Don't waste your time with lesser deities.

If you look carefully, you will notice that I have not taken any stance. There are some sentences in the Quran that suggest that there may be some commanality, so I have merely asked some obvious questions. Besides, this is not a new subject and some experts also have given thought to such questions, so I thought of refering these questions to atheists here. Most seem to have understood this.

It's tough to know how to answer that. Allah certainly has the more militant voice. But despite that, Christianity is still ahead on numbers, and Western countries still run the show. Neither claims many big miracles in the last 2k years; all the flooding and laying-to-waste happened in the old time. Muslims do seem to have the edge in fervency, but Christians always come through in a pinch. The chessgame is still in progress.